Author Archives : Hugh Galland

Former Eater frontman ANDY BLADE spoke to Vive Le Rock for last month’s issue. He had quite a lot to say for himself so we thought you’d like to see Hugh Gulland’s whole feature in full…..

TRIPLE BLADE ACTION

Andy Blade’s latest release sees the former Eater frontman taking full control of a solo career that’s seen numerous twists since his former band’s demise in 1979. Hugh Gulland skips off school to find out more.

“There’s a lot of old faces,” Andy Blade muses about the demographic at his recent solo gigs. “Old punks, they make up about fifty per cent. And the rest of it are interested people, who are via the internet, thinking ‘There’s a punk rock legend playing’ − doesn’t matter who I was in! I don’t mind the fact, at least they show up − then it’s a case of getting them on board in reality, and not just liking me because I’m an old punk!”

After a somewhat sporadic solo output characterised by various short-lived writing partnerships, Blade’s recent trio of albums represents a more concentrated public campaign than we’ve seen in some years from this often reclusive artist. His latest offering, the darkly claustrophobic Plastic Penny And The Strange Wooden Horse, reveals something of Blade’s inner workings:

“The original title comes from Denim − you know Lawrence? One of his songs on a recent album was just a list of band names that he thought sounded cool. There’s some really funny ones, like Heavy Jelly, funny words that sound good together. And one of them was Plastic Penny And The Strange Wooden Horse, and that’s how I came up with the title.

“But, I saw it as a metaphor, Plastic Penny being us, and The Strange Wooden Horse being authority, government, or whatever it is we’re being suppressed by. Basically Plastic Penny is all the good ideas, and The Strange Wooden Horse are all the bad ideas, and just that fight between them.”

The language of that title track is strikingly sinister, almost sexually threatening…

“Yeah it is, it’s meant to be, sexually threatening is right. The choice of words, I’m not actually saying anything, but they sound sexually threatening. And it’s the idea of having your power taken away from you by a bigger kind of force, but it’s also having a go at all popular culture; the hipster, trends… I think people have been reduced to ignorance, and unless you use this kind of heavily suggestive, in-your-face kind of language to express yourself, our feelings all get homogenised, and made acceptable and nice. With any songwriter, it’s always a case of not toning anything down, and if you can up the ante, with hints or suggestions, just placing the right key word here and there… it’s not really saying one thing in particular, it’s more about lashing out at invisible enemies that you have no control over.”

There’s quite a claustrophobic tone to the album altogether?

“I think that’s because, in my head I feel pretty claustrophobic… not just in music but every single way, socially. I’m not part of a profession, apart from a musician, which is a very loose profession… I’m not part of any particular group, I keep finding out I don’t belong, the older I get the more I find out I don’t seem to belong.

“Even more so than when I was a punk, at least I had a community there to belong to. There was a very identifiable community, anybody that was pissed off can join. Nowadays I feel like I’m totally alone.”

Might some of this be exacerbated by the nature of your current location, Guildford?

“Guildford’s like a second-class Richmond, without the celebrities and stuff, and it’s so homogenised. They’ve got an ACM school there, which is the rock school, and it produced Ed fucking Sheeran! Everybody in Guildford’s got a guitar on their back if they’re under 25, and they’re talking about the course they’re on that’s going to turn them into pop stars…

“That’s the kind of town Guildford is, as long as they can say to their kids that they helped them try to achieve their dream, even though it’s a total waste of time. But yes, it is a bit of a Stepford town, but I don’t think that’s the reason. Because that’s the way I felt from California, to Richmond, to Muswell Hill, it doesn’t really matter where it is, I never felt like part of what’s going on, anywhere.

“Even with punk, it felt to me as though me and Brian [Chevette], the guitarist, were conning people, at school, that we had a band; we said we did before we did have a band for starters! We obviously wanted a band, but we didn’t have the money for instruments, so we eventually nicked our first instruments − and that’s when, for the first time, I realised if you turned around to someone and said ‘I’m this or I’m that’ and you showed them scant evidence, like a guitar or a card, that’s all they need.

“If I’d been more confident with that, Eater would have been have been hugely successful. The only problem being, at fifteen or sixteen, we were under the impression someone’s going to rumble us any second now and say ‘Hang on a minute, you’re not proper musicians!’ Even though punk’s supposed to be not proper musicians, we still felt like ‘We’re getting away with this’!

“It’s only now, lately, that I realise Eater did actually mean a lot to quite a lot of people, and it wasn’t a case of ‘We’re getting away with this, and someone’s gonna come in any minute and say, go home’. It almost felt like things can only be sanctioned with hindsight, which is sad cos at the time something’s happening, you don’t do as much as you could do, because you spend half the time looking over your shoulder!”

Listening to Eater’s catalogue now, it’s almost like you were the crystallisation of what a UK punk band was truly supposed to be – teenagers still working out how to use their instruments!

“I’m not just saying this egotistically, I think we were the real definition of a punk band! We were actually the first, when Johnny Rotten made that famous comment, he wants everyone to form a band and bla bla, we took that literally! It’s not like we thought ‘We’ll stop playing jazz fusion now’, or ‘We’ll stop playing rock ’n’ roll’; we hadn’t played anything!

“We were just, tune up and we’ll learn three chords now, and those songs that you apparently can write… and it was after buying that Ramones album, [it] was proof that three chords and a short song could be fine. And so I think we really were the definition, most of the bands that are now punk legends had been in, you know, Bay City Rollers tribute bands! Jimmy Pursey for instance, the year before he formed Sham 69, he really was in a Bay City Rollers lookalike band!

“Others, The Heartbreakers, you know, were hardly spring chickens, they weren’t the same, although they were welcomed when they came over, Eater shared their same manager, they were like heroes of ours, purely because of the Dolls rather than what they actually were… although undeniably tight and undeniably good. I listened to LAMF the other day, and there’s one track on it that’s sort of punky and new wavey, that’s ‘All By Myself’, all the other songs are rehashed R&B type riffs and stodgy ‘Chinese Rocks’ type…, it’s all fine, great, they’re played well, but really nothing to make you go ‘Fuck me!’ Just, ‘It’s alright’ − but it was such a change from the weedy sounding people who couldn’t play, on the circuit; you could go and see a band who could play a whole set without guitar strings breaking or without someone walking off in a hissy fit, you could get to the end, applause between each song, professional! It’s all good. But there’s surprisingly few who were the definition of a punk band! Eater were!”

Lyrically, you were deliberately provocative?

“I think you have to do that, because what else were we going to write about? We had a rough idea of the nihilism, like of the Ramones lyrics, and the idea of writing a song based around ‘I don’t wanna walk around with you’, it was easy. And then the idea of slagging off teachers and headmasters was easy, because we were still at school, and we made difficulty at school! I was being taken to court, at the time, I didn’t even realise how serious that was until recently when I found letters to my mother from the education services! They were taking her to court cos I’d missed school, and they were about to put me in a special school, right up until my sixteenth birthday, which was when Outside View, the first single, was released.

“They had plans to more or less kidnap me, and take me off to this special school, I’d broken the law by missing school, but that wasn’t the real reason… I won’t go into that! Lots of other reasons (the headmaster) wanted me thrown out of the school, there was a little bit of that, a little bit of the fact that I’d broken the rules, my mother hadn’t made me go to school, although I don’t know how she could have made me go to school. And I didn’t realise how serious it was, they hounded me right up till sixteen, which is so weird; I was doing well in this band that everybody was going on about all the time, we’d taken them to see the proof of the pudding − the records, newspapers with our name in it etc. And yet they were still trying to prosecute, send my mum to jail, or whatever they were going to do, or send me to a reform school… but we had something, we were a real band.

“It’s very unusual to find any band under sixteen years old that hadn’t been put together or manufactured by a label, or by a Svengali, and we were probably the only band ever, tied to rock ’n’ roll, that did everything ourselves, literally everything, and no other involvement until we were established. And then we had people get on board.”

“He approached us, he saw an advert in the back of the Melody Maker, which was the bible for advertising at the time, saying ‘punk band require bass player’. We had Dee Generate and Brian in the band, but we needed a bass player. He phoned up, saying he’s a record label, and a sound engineer, he works for the Sex Pistols, he’s starting a record label with Johnny Rotten called Rotten Records and would we like to sign? So yeah, of course, and then it turns into, well Johnny Rotten’s not actually involved in it, and it’s not actually called Rotten Records. They slowly but surely pulled the wool over our eyes after attracting us in, and tied us to a contract I’ve never ever been able to get out of since!”

Eater folded in 1979, was there a final straw or was it a question of gradual erosion?

“It was really a straw, it was getting to the point of… after we found out about the Polydor (Japan) deal, that was really it, and also we wanted more wages, we were then paid £15 a week − which wasn’t that bad for then! The direction we were going was nowhere, without Brian in the band, someone else to write with. It was just Ian [Woodcock] taking control of the band, and he was, cos I wasn’t turning up to rehearsals − he had a perfect band now, when he joined us there was three crappy musicians and him, and by the time we were about to split there was three good musicians and me! And the good musicians jammed, did what good musicians do – take all the excitement out of the music!

“I didn’t like the direction it was going in, I went from being totally up for walking half way across London to get to a rehearsal, walking back at midnight, to not being arsed to get out of bed to get in a car to take me to a rehearsal. So when I suggested we all turn up and tell Caruso [Fuller] what a XX!X he is, they loved that idea, and it brought us all back together suddenly, we turned up in a show of force, and so we had this big scene, with him screaming, begging us to come back into the office, ‘you can’t split now, we’ve got a second album to come out’ and came out with this classic line ‘You can’t teach me jack shit about rock ’n’ roll’ − made us laugh all the way back to Finchley!”

So after this you began to work with Brian James?

“That’s when the solo career started, I’d been writing with Brian, and he was looking for a singer for Lords Of The New Church, his next project after Tanz Der Youth, he’d been out of The Damned for a while by then. And I think he was eyeing me up for that job. We recorded a couple of songs that were really OK, and if we’d carried on working together I think it would have been really good, and I was really up for that. But when he started to go to Stiv Bators, it was obvious that was a better move, as far as I could see, for him to do that. Actually looking back, we would have made a good team, I liked his writing, I’d like to have worked with him, but that didn’t come to much, after a bit of recording. And I started working with Billy Duffy, after Slaughter And The Dogs split up. Because of their age, they were closest to our age, they were a bit older than us, but we met them early on, so we were kind of on the same wavelength. They split and formed the band Studio Sweethearts. The band sounded like the name, it was like done up in the studio, all swish production and crap lyrics! And Billy was the best one in it, and we became friends, he moved into the flat above me and we became mates, and he joined my band. Phil Rowland out of Eater, had come in to drum [with Studio Sweethearts], I nicked Billy from him, and we recorded a single together, did a lot of gigs − the songwriting was getting good. He was another guy that I found really good to work with, and he was looking for someone that he could work with, and write lyrics. He’d gone to Morrissey before, and he’d tried to coerce Morrissey into − I think he did a bit, with Ed Banger and the Nosebleeds, a very early incarnation. Just before he met me, he tried again, when he was trying to get out of the Studio Sweethearts, he tried again to see if Morrissey was into doing something rather than sitting in his room, but he didn’t want to do anything! He actually did, he was in The Smiths about a year later, Johnny Marr had to go and get him out his room!

“So eventually Billy and I started to work together, and it was really good, and the songs were great, we wrote about twelve really interesting tracks in the space of a couple of weeks, and just as we’d got a band together and started rehearsing, he got another offer, from Kirk [Brandon, Theatre Of Hate] − it was big compared to ‘the ex-singer out of Eater’, and so he took that, and then nothing came of it, and he then joined The Cult. But again, I think if he’d gone a different route, we could have done something pretty good. After that I gave up looking for a guitarist. This trilogy of albums I’ve released since 2008 − I’d totally given up on the idea of working with someone else. It’s a bit self-indulgent when you play and record everything yourself, but it’s making up for a lot of lost time that you’ve spend watering down ideas by working with people who turn out not to be… you don’t have any faith in someone, writing songs with someone, you really have to have them sussed otherwise you’re at risk of giving them something really valuable, for them to kick the shit out of it and turn it into something that’s horrible, ruin its aesthetic value.

“If you’re the one with the ideas, it’s taken me a very long to realise, I have ideas, that’s always been the case, I feel like I don’t have the time to waste, either to write songs with someone or collaborate in any way. Until I can totally have things my way financially, and get the people I want, I’m stuck with having to do everything myself, because I just don’t trust anyone else!”

You’re out there gigging on the back of this new album, what does the immediate future hold?

“I only have short-term aims, I don’t make plans, a lot my time is spent thinking about mortality. Not that I’ve got anything that’s gonna kill me, but I had a bad scare a few years back that really made me have to question that side of things, so I don’t make a lot of plans. But I have a new book coming out, that I’ve almost finished, that will be out this year, and I have a guy in the States − weird tenuous connection – he worked on that very popular comedy sitcom, [Curb Your Enthusiasm]; one of the writers on that show is an old mate of mine, came out to England from California in the punk years, and he’d back out in Hollywood now, is a top guy out there; he loves the idea of turning my original book Secret Life Of A Teenage Punk Rocker into a movie. He wants it to be a movie but has the idea of turn it into a sitcom, after a movie!”

Beyond this, Andy has been nurturing plans for one particular gig some way off the usual circuit:

“I’m hoping to go to Gaza to play a gig. Because a friend of mine, Palestinian, was killed by the Israelis at a demonstration back in the late nineties. And we were really good friends, he effectively saved my life on one occasion, I was really upset when he died. The problem is, as soon as you say you’re doing something for anybody connected with Palestine or Israel it immediately becomes all political. And I’m sick of arguing about the rights and wrongs of the situation… I’m really not interested in the politics, the only reason I want to do a gig there is I promised my mate one day I would do that. In my heart I would like to do that.”

Plastic Penny And The Strange Wooden Horse is out now through Flycatcher / Cherry Red.

London’s Denmark Street – aka Tin Pan Alley – the epicentre of the capital’s music heritage, currently under threat from developers – is to be immortalised in a new documentary.

Henry Scott-Irvine, Chairman-Founder of the SAVE DENMARK STREET CAMPAIGN, has been in touch with Vive Le Rock to update us on current events and the upcoming film.

“Save Denmark Street as a campaign has had some significant successes. We have gained upgraded Historic England status at three addresses. 6 Denmark St – where the Sex Pistols lived, rehearsed and recorded their early demos in the out building to the rear – is now ‘Grade 2 Star’ listed since March 22nd 2016. Notably, Hipgnosis the album sleeve design company for albums by Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin was also based at 6 in the main listed building. Next door at 7 is also protected to ‘Grade 2 Star’ and 26 the former 12 Bar Club has seen The Old Forge (or Smithy) stage moved, while a new 200 standing-room-only venue is built beneath it. This will reside above an ‘Event Gallery’ or multipurpose underground 2000 capacity venue if old Denmark St north can withstand all the digging under it, because Crossrail itself also goes beneath both venues.

“Meanwhile, the music shops and some music spaces above now have new protections granted under an ‘S106 Deal’ that we influenced. This was signed-off between Camden Planning Depts. and Consolidated Developments in July 2015 and extended in July 2016. So we are now calling for the Street to become a ‘Music Heritage Zone’, but thus far both Camden Council and The GLA’s Music Officers have been resistant to this idea, which we will continue to tout for vociferously.

“Tin Pan Alley Tales – The Film is a documentary project currently in pre-production. The film will be a chronology of this unique street, spanning some 300 yards and some 300 years. Presented as an urban Canterbury Tales our 75 minute film will be told by approximately 12 key characters that have had an historic association with Denmark Street. Expect exclusive untold tales pertaining to David Bowie, The Small Faces, Marc Bolan, Black Sabbath, The Rolling Stones, The Sex Pistols, amid secret histories outside of music but from within the street itself. These ‘Tin Pan Alley Tales’ will feature alongside those key characters who’ve either lived or worked in Britain’s only music street.

“Denmark Street is formed of some 28 addresses and was affectionately known as Tin Pan Alley – the home of British music publishing and song writing from 1911 until 1991. It was originally named after its Manhattan counterpart. Since then it has continued to be a home of 2 venues, 11 music shops, guitar makers, guitar repairers, rehearsal spaces, agents, producers, studios, and production companies.

“Since we started running the ‘Save Tin Pan Alley Campaign’ the true ‘unsung heroes’ of Tin Pan Alley – the musicians, the technicians and the people behind-the-scenes – have come out of the woodwork, out of history and out of retirement to approach us. People that would be very hard to find in any other circumstance have literally come forward from across the globe. They’re saying, “We want to be in your film!” And we have them here now. They’re ‘Ready, Willing, and Able’. And so are we, but we need your donations!

Vive Le Rock can refute the recent rumours that Anne Pigalle, The Last Chanteuse, was dead!

The Last Chanteuse – who grew up with punk in Paris, came to the UK, released a revolutionary European album of torch songs, and created some of the most exciting soirées in London in the 80s – seemed to have vanished from the public eye.

But far from it. While all culture has slowly been crushed and erased and cultural buildings closed or destroyed, Anne Pigalle has certainly been more than active.

Coming back from LA, where she spent most of the 90s working on a visual and musical concept with the likes of Donald Cammell (Performance), Anne returned to London and unleashed her bag of new found ammunition.

From experimental amérotic poetry filled soirées (âme means soul in French) to exhibitions such as her influential and infamous self-portrait polaroids ‘Amérotica’at the prestigious Michael Hoppen Gallery, as well as painting shows with the Aquarium gallery (home of Jimmy Cauty and Jamie Reid), she also added her own brand of art performance.

Anne Pigalle has been more alive than alive, and influenced a new London cabaret scene by creating a fresh market promoting freedom and eroticism. A lot of her visual work is reminiscent of religious ex votos with an esoteric and sensual take, often decorated with objets trouvés. People in the know have compared Anne’s work as somewhere between a surrealist Claude Cahun with a mix of Toulouse Lautrec and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

This period was followed by the release of the Madame Sex Art CD, a collection of erotic and surrealist poetic vignettes, where each CD cover was painted individually.

In the last couple of years Anne has also been very active as an activist in terms of her involvement with the slow demolition of Soho, participating in demo protestations and films, lecturing and explaining how Soho was built with the knowledge of the Huguenots immigrants and organizing multiple events with Soho related performers.

NOT DEAD is an exhibition about our spirit – the spirit of the people who believe in, and stand for, a worthwhile sentiment of a civilized society, the spirit to fight and save our right to a human life.

Anne Pigalle dead? No. NOT DEAD. Come and see for yourselves… The Last Chanteuse is Dead, Vive The Last Chanteuse!

As THE VIBRATORS gear up for a tour-de-force show celebrating 40 years of the band, including appearances from the classic line ups, original guitarist John Ellis takes Vive Le Rock back to his formative days as an aspiring musician.

“I was a lover of music, the thing is probably my mum actually, she was a big Lonnie Donegan fan; every time we were on holiday, in places like Great Yarmouth, at that time bands used to play those kind of gigs, summer residences, on the pier. Cliff and the Shadows had been around a long time as well, so I saw Cliff and The Shadows do pantomime, so I was well into the twangy guitars! And also the Beatles were coming through when I was eleven or twelve, and that was pretty amazing. But prior to that I’d seen Lonnie Donegan live a few times.

“Now I teach blues guitar workshops and I’m a massive fan of the blues, it’s one of the main musics for me; but what I didn’t realise when I was a young man, eight or nine years old – and why would I have done – but I was actually witnessing the birth of the British blues boom. Lonnie Donegan was almost single handedly responsible for creating what you could call that blues revival, him and Alexis Corner, and those few people were responsible for bringing over those blues greats. And out of those little bands, you’ve got your Eric Claptons and your Jeff Becks and your Jimmy Pages. You’ve got your burgeoning birth of the British blues. And of course British blues went on to become rock music and then went on to become, eventually, punk and everything else.

“That was my background as a musician and I’d fiddled around with a guitar – my gran had bought me a guitar and everything. But I never really got into guitar (until) I started Bazooka Joe with my friend Daniel. You’re probably talking about ‘68, we were probably doing those Hampstead Town Hall gigs. After I left (Daniel) carried it on, so he’d have much more understanding of the history of the band, and of course Adam Ant became a member of Bazooka Joe – and the first ever Sex Pistols gig was supporting Bazooka Joe!”

With a short series of live solo dates scheduled over the next couple of months, ONLY ONES frontman PETER PERRETT revealed to Vive Le Rock his intentions for some forthcoming new material:

“The tentative plan is to get an album recorded, hopefully ready to release for February/March. All I’ve done so far is one day in the studio with the band (STRANGEFRUIT) doing backing tracks; five backing tracks and then three or four days doing overdubs and vocals. And there was two songs that I was happy with, to release. Since then, the bass player – Peter, my son – and the drummer (Jake Woodward), who are both at college doing a music degree, they both finished their finals half way through June. It’s really intensive, music degrees, they really work you hard, they’re having to play, every night, things in 9/8 and things, it really is intense – I couldn’t really call on them! So, after they finished, we had four days rehearsal before going to Amsterdam.

“And so, every day it went up a level, the way we were playing. Although I’m happy with the two songs I thought I was going to (release), I was going to go back into the studio and mix them… but, part of me enjoyed playing the other new songs that I did, so much that I thought, ‘If we have a few more days rehearsal…’ – although they’re great musicians, it doesn’t give the songs enough time to develop. I just felt it went up a level, so… Jamie (Peter’s younger son, guitar) was a bit upset, because he spent loads of time editing everything ready to go in and mix it, and I said to him ‘Ah, I want to redo it!'”

While further Only Ones activity is by no means out of the question, Peter will be backed up by Strangefruit for his upcoming shows. Fans can expect a balance of old and new material on the night:

“The band are a really tight band, cos they play together as Strangefruit, but we haven’t had that much rehearsal time doing my new songs. We did a gig in Hebden Bridge where we had some rehearsal time, but that was mainly learning Only Ones songs, because that’s what the audience expects. In the nineties, I had a band (The One) and I wanted to not trade on my past, I wanted my new songs to stand out, so to begin with I did a third Only Ones songs, two thirds new songs. But the last gig (The One) did, it was in the Roadhouse Manchester, and someone put the setlist on line, and first song, ‘Another Girl, Another Planet’, get that out the way, and all the other songs were new songs; that’s the way I used to be then.”

“Now I understand, from a fan’s point of view, because I’ve been in the audience since then, seen people, and I quite like it when I recognise the song. From a fan’s point of view, especially people that’ve never seen you play the old songs, you’ve got to be a bit more giving. I used to think it was like taking the easy way out, playing the songs that everyone knew and wanted to hear, I always cared more passionately about new songs, and thought maybe it was playing the game too much, being a bit more like a cabaret or a nostalgia trip, or a heritage band or whatever they call it… I used to think that that was somehow selling out.

“Now I realise that maybe I’m a bit too radical in my ideas as to what a performance and a gig should be, and they should be a bit more give and take. There’s nothing wrong with playing old songs. So to begin with they had to learn the Only Ones songs so I could function giving the people the songs they’ve liked over the years. But really my passion is about getting them to learn the new songs as soon as possible.

“Really all I want to do is record. To begin with, I thought it would be a distraction doing gigs; but it’s been good, because when you’ve got a gig it forces you, ‘Oh I’ve got a gig next week, I’d better rehearse’; so four rehearsals in a row, I actually started feeling like a musician, and so I wrote four songs over the three week period. Without feeling like a musician, I don’t want to write new songs, because I’ve got a bunch of new songs that aren’t recorded yet, ones that were played over the Only Ones (reunion) time, and other ones as well, and I’ve got this dread that I’ve got these great songs that I’m proud of that’ll never get recorded… and so it’s a deterrent to writing!

“The thing of having a gig to do is you think ‘I’d better get into musician mode, I’ve got to walk out and be a musician’, and so feeling like a musician, rather than someone who used to be a musician a long time ago, I’ve actually started enjoying writing again. And the feeling of writing a song and three days later playing it with a band, and it happens… sometimes songs take a while, but occasionally there’s a song that is just so simple, and that’s why I did this new song ‘Living In My Head’ in Amsterdam, cos as soon as I started playing it with the group, it just sounded amazing.

“And it just gave me a buzz, and inspired me to write more songs, so since I got back from Amsterdam I’ve written two and a half songs. Which is quite a lot for me, after going years and years without…”

See next month’s edition of Vive Le Rock for more from Peter. The revised edition of Nina Antonia’s The One And Only biography is available now through Thin Man Press. Peter will be playing live on:

Gearing up to promote his new Command Performance album over a series of UK dates, TAV FALCO shares some thoughts with us on his relationship with Alex Chilton and the formative stage of Panther Burns:

“When Alex and I started to make music, I turned him on to something he’d really never considered, which was blues. It was around in Memphis, but you know, the sort of music can be around you, you’re just not particularly drawn to it; it’s not that Alex didn’t like it, he just hadn’t been drawn to it for any particular reason. And also some of the avant-garde music I was listening to, he got into that and he got into the video tapes we were making, that was another thing that drew him into our interest in the blues. And then Alex turned me onto rock’n’roll. Prior to that I never thought about playing rock’n’roll, I’d wanted to learn a little blues guitar, but didn’t think about doing much with it, I’d done a little bit with blues artists in Memphis, in a folkloristic kind of way, and I’d also studied folklore. And was very much into John Fahey… and the folklore work of John Lomax, and his research and books. John was the real theoretician in Harvard on folklore. Anyway, Alex showed me some simple things in rock’n’roll, I never thought I could play rock’n’roll, to me that required a real musician. For me, blues, you didn’t have to be a musician. You didn’t have to be a musician that knew how to read music or a chord chart, you didn’t have to be a trade musician, is what I’m trying to say. You could do beautiful things. I tried to teach myself music notation, I tried to read it, learn it, I couldn’t do it on my own. And I never got in the position to study music. So when Alex started to turn me onto rock’n’roll, he didn’t read music either, at that time. And Frank Sinatra only knew the intervals, like a lot of jazz people. So I tried to make a couple more stabs at it once Panther Burns started. And thought, well this is gonna hang me up, I wanna play music intuitively and I know I’m gonna be limited in what I can do, but it’s gonna be my work and it’s gonna be more a stamp of who I am. So that’s what I did in Panther Burns, I have had the privilege to work with some trained musicians, and that’s also part of the explosive nature of some of our work. Because, it’s like Marshall McLuhan said, if you get two clichés and you rub ‘em together, you get an explosion. Take a trained musician and you take a musician who is untrained, a musician who plays intuitively, you get something you do not get otherwise, whether all-intuitive aboriginals, or all trained musicians working together.

“So to further that on the first album, Behind The Magnolia Curtain, we had developed musicians in the group; we had Alex, we had Jim Duckworth the jazz player, we had Ron Miller on avant garde jazz bass, a symphony player who knows music very well and studied with some great jazz artists, who knew Pharoah Sanders and all those people. We had them on the sessions and we brought in the Mississippi Fife and Drum Corps, only the drummers, that was Jessie Mae Hemphill on marching snare drum, and she came from a musical family, her father Sid Hemphill was a blues artist in the area. Later she became known as the She Wolf, on guitar, she played drums on that record with two marching snares and one bass drum, and this music has more African retentions than any American music.”

Tav Falco and Panther Burns play Stroud UK Goods Shed Artspace on Tues 9th, Cardiff Moon on Weds 10th, Manchester Ruby Lounge on Thurs 11th, London Oslo on Fri 12th, Edinburgh Mash House Sat 13th, Glasgow Poetry Club on Sun 14th and Middlesborough Westgarth Social on Mon 15th. See the current issue for further conversation with Tav.

The film’s directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard spoke of the impact the band and their music has had on them and their debut feature 20,000 Day On Earth since shooting Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds live at Sydney Opera house on their 2013 Push The Sky Away tour.

"’Jubilee Street’ forced its way into our film. We’d planned to end with ‘Push The Sky Away’ and it’s pertinent lyrics about rock ‘n’ roll getting you right down to your soul; but after the band played ‘Jubilee Street’ at Sydney Opera House we didn’t stand a chance. Only four songs in and there was Nick, transforming in front of us. Our lives haven’t been the same since."

The film constructs a narrative and cinematic reality that seamlessly blends performance and storytelling with emotional truths. Neither a music documentary nor a concert film, 20,000 Days On Earth contains not just electrifying performances, but also keen insights into the creative process: we see a song grow from the tiniest of ideas sketched out by Cave in his office to a monstrous epic performed by the peerless Bad Seeds on stage at Sydney Opera House.

View the lyric video to “Give Us a Kiss” here: http://smarturl.it/ncandtbskissvid

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds fifteenth studio album Push The Sky Away was released in 2013 to a chorus of laudatory global reviews, charting at number 1 in seven countries. With their recent US shows were extolled as “utterly spectacular” in NME, and hailed by their fans as their best yet, the Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds story continues to unfold and grow.

The impetus for the added recording came from the recent reintroduction to The Saints of Barrington Francis, who played in the band from 1979 to 1989. “There’s magic that happens when Barrington, Peter [Wilkinson, the drummer] and I get together,” says Chris. “In this technological world where everything is nine million tracks on computer it’s very important to retain the immediacy of rock’n’roll, to keep that earthy, organic, primitive side. If you can type, you can type an album these days, but there’s something that happens when you rely on people playing together.”

The Saints have reached a huge new audience thanks to Bruce Springsteen, who covered their ‘Just Like Fire Would’ on his 2014 global No 1 album, High Hopes. “Bruce told me: ‘I bought the album when it came out and I’ve always really loved that song’,” says Chris. “I’d known that he’d done the song live on his last tour, but I never in my wildest imagining thought he’d release it”.

It’s the latest development in the career of a band that found themselves at the forefront of the punk revolution with the release of their era-defining single ‘(I’m) Stranded’ in 1976, (NME made it Single of the Week; Sounds made it Single of the Year; and EMI executives raced to sign them), that led to Top of the Pops, and a stack of classic albums. Since then The Saints have one moment blasted out the most raucous rock’n’roll, and the next created some the most affecting, emotional lyricism, and often even done it at the same time.

Chris Bailey’s songwriting has always been key to The Saints. “My job is to come up with vignettes that make sense on a poetic, intellectual and artistic level, and in the context of a rock’n’roll band, which is what I always want The Saints to be,” he says. “The Saints aren’t your average rock band. Never have been, never want to be. This is another manifestation of that.”

King of the Sun / King of the Midnight Sun out 17 November on Fire Records

“Worshipped… a truly great band” – NME

“More stage presence than an army of attitudinal hipsters and a back catalogue to kill for” – The Independent

“Chris Bailey, a distillation of [John] Lennon and… Van [Morrison], and one of the great punk larynxes” – Uncut

The former garage-punks, recently covered by Bruce Springsteen, break new ground with two albums that are the same – but different…

Why would a band re-record their new album in its entirety and then release them both at the same time? Because, as leader Chris Bailey puts it, “it’s both sides of The Saints in one package”. And so the deluxe debut European release of their King of the Sun features not only that album – a beautiful, expansive collection that harks back to Saints high points like ‘Ghost Ships’ – but also a freshly recorded rock’n’roll take on exactly the same set of songs, recorded as live, and called King of the Midnight Sun.

“I’m very proud of the studio album as a listening piece,” says Chris. “It’s lyrical, musical, an exploration of songwriting. Midnight is more a celebration of the strengths of a rock band. There’s a swagger on it that there isn’t on the original.”

1. Higgs Boson Blues 7. Mermaids 2. Far From Me 8. People Ain’t No Good 3. Stranger Than Kindness 9. Into My Arms (limited vinyl only) 4. The Mercy Seat 10. God Is In The House (limited vinyl only) 5. And No More Shall We Part 11. Push The Sky Away 6. Wide Lovely Eyes 12. Jack The Ripper

View the Trailer Here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0yLsDnnLgE

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds have scored 6 Australian ARIA nominations for ‘Push The Sky Away’. The album reached number one in Australia and nominations include – Best Live Act, Album of the Year, Best Group, Best Adult Contemporary Album, Best Independent Release & Best Video (for ‘Jubilee Street’)

UK Tour: October 24th DOME, Brighton – SOLD OUT October 26th HAMMERSMITH APOLLO, London – SOLD OUT October 27th HAMMERSMITH APOLLO, London – SOLD OUT October 28th HAMMERSMITH APOLLO, London – SOLD OUT October 30th APOLLO, Manchester – SOLD OUT October 31st BARROWLAND, Glasgow – SOLD OUT November 1st USHER HALL, Edinburgh – SOLD OUT

Ruts DC will be Special Guests on the forthcoming UK Damned tour (dates below).

The Ruts and Ruts DC have a long history with the Damned completing several tours with them in the past. This promises to be an excellent line-up; who knows what will happen as they share a tour bus around the UK!

The Vinyl Collection will include all the studio albums, along with a booklet featuring interviews with the band and photos. Demon will be working with the band & their fans, with no expense spared on full reproductions of the original albums, re-mastering from the original tapes in original cardboard sleeves on 180-gram vinyl.

Three bonus LPs exclusive to the box set will also be included. For the first time on vinyl the BBC sessions will be released together. A bespoke deluxe gatefold package will contain John Peel Sessions and additional Janice Long sessions that appeared across the Demon CD re-issue packages. Also, through a fan-lead competition on social networks across the world, fans will vote for their favorite The Jesus & Mary Chain B-Sides & Rarities, the most popular of which will feature on a bespoke LP. Contributors to this Anniversary competition will have the chance of their profile pictures inserted into a mosaic poster of an iconic The Jesus And Mary Chain image exclusive to the package via the bands D2C store.

The Jesus And Mary Chain Vinyl Collection – The numbered and limited box set will include the following all six studio albums in their original formats re-mastered to lacquers and pressed on heavyweight vinyl from lacquers:

In addition to fan voted favorite tracks, there will be a 32-page, hard back 12” x 12” book housing all the interviews from Demon CD Deluxe Editions, an exclusive mosaic poster, along with additional photography, plus up-to-date content from the band. A glossy memorabilia photo card with numbering will be included in every box in the limited run.

“Cited by nearly every group in punk’s long lineage and by more than a few arty types, the Velvets defined New York rock, poised between street-level grit and literary irony, rock simplicity and minimalistic drones, clarity and noise.”– The New York Times

On December 3rd, 2013, Universal Music Enterprises (UMe) will release The Velvet Underground – White Light/White Heat 45th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition, a three-disc, 30-track set featuring both the original stereo and mono releases, completely remastered, with bonus tracks including alternate versions, unreleased outtakes, John Cale’s last studio sessions with the band, and the official release of their show at The Gymnasium in New York recorded on April 30, 1967, which includes five previously unreleased performances culled from John Cale’s personal copy. The 45th anniversary set was developed in conjunction with Lou Reed and John Cale, the exclusive material is as follows:

*Never-before-heard tracks from Live At The Gymnasium, New York City, April 30, 1967– “I’m Not A Young Man Anymore,” “I’m Waiting For The Man,” “Run Run Run,” “Sister Ray,” and “The Gift”

*New liner notes from David Fricke

Originally released by Verve Records on January 30, 1968, the LP cracked Billboard’s Top 200 albums chart on March 16, entering at No. 199. Forty-five years later, The Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat is considered one of the most influential albums of all time, laying down the blue print for punk and experimental rock, critically acclaimed and included on many “Top Lists” including Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time and on Rolling Stone’s Greatest Artists List.

Disc one of The Velvet Underground – White Light/White Heat 45th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition starts with the original six-song stereo version of White Light/White Heat, with the album’s title track plunging head first into 40 minutes of unprecedented, transgressive rock storytelling, propelled by epic distortion, lacerating guitar drone and severe, rhythmic purism – "the Statue of Liberty of punk," Lou Reed contends, "with the light on top. It’s beyond unique and wonderful. No other group can touch what that is. You can’t try to be that."

Other tracks include the airy yearning of "Here She Comes Now," one of the Velvets’ finest ballads which gives the listener a two-minute breather with its “almost” serene beauty before being launched back in; the upbeat, hard-hitting proto-punk track "I Heard Her Call My Name,” punctuated with Reed’s biting guitar soloing, intertwined with a wall of distortion and feedback; the experimental sung and spoken noir of "Lady Godiva’s Operation" and "The Gift”; climaxing with the propulsive, distorted eternity of sexual candour and twilight drug life, rendered dry and real in Reed’s lethal monotone, in the 17-minute-plus "Sister Ray." Bonus tracks include an alternate take of “I Heard Her Call My Name”; the instrumental version of “Guess I’m Falling In Love,” recorded during the White Light/White Heat sessions but left unfinished; plus the original mixes of tracks “Temptation Inside Your Head” and “Stephanie Says”; two different recordings of “Hey Mr. Rain”; and a previously unreleased early version of “Beginning To See The Light” recorded during John Cale’s last studio session with the Velvet Underground in May of 1968.

Disc two contains the original mono version of White Light/White Heat plus mono single mixes of “Here She Comes Now” and “White Light/White Heat,” as well as an instrumental and a vocal version of “The Gift,” both of which had been unreleased.

The Velvet Underground – White Light/White Heat 45th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition also includes a third disc featuring the official release of the revelatory Gymnasium tape, recorded live during the Velvets’ residency at a short-lived New York club in April 1967, five months before the White Light/White Heat sessions. This show was previously only available on bootlegs and includes the complete version of the instrumental “Booker T.,” plus the tracks “I’m Not A Young Man Anymore,” “I’m Waiting For The Man,” “Run Run Run” and a version of “Sister Ray” that clocks in just under 19 minutes.

Many have tried. Some have come close. More will try again, in the wake of this definitive reissue, The Velvet Underground – White Light/White Heat 45th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition.

Initial pre-orders of the Super Deluxe Box Set on the Boxset Store will received a limited edition white flexi disc featuring “Booker T – Live at the Gymnasium NYC. Limited to availability whilst stocks last. http://po.st/u7C94N

This summer, Demon Records return with audiophile-friendly heavyweight vinyl releases from a broad spectrum of influential and adored artists across several genres. The rare and incredibly limited runs of releases are only available once, and represent a number of Demon’s illustrious catalogue artists plus exciting new third party projects with What Records. The releases are as follows:

Artist: Foghat

Title: ‘Fool For The City’

Cat No: DEMREC08

Quantity: Strictly limited to 500 copies

Info: Reissued for the first time since it’s astounding initial release which earned a double platinum certification for over two million copies sold. The breakthrough album is a rock classic which features the huge "Slow Ride" amongst a killer batch of often criminally overlooked classics.

Artist: Sugar

Title: ‘Beaster’

Cat No: EDLP1002

Quantity: Strictly limited to 500 copies

Info: Recorded at the same sessions that produced their classic debut Cooper Blue, this sophomore collection was very much the dark flipside to the album’s widescreen powerpop. Retaining his gift for great hooks, Beaster saw frontman and songwriter Bob Mould screaming confessional and rawly emotional lyrics against a raging torrent of noisy guitars. Ably backed by the by David Barbe and Malcolm Travis the songs combine a wall of sound dynamics with powerfully religious imagery and carefully layered arrangements. Sugar were vindicated in issuing such an extreme sonic statement but the album entered the UK charts at number three and cemented their reputation as uncompromising but brilliantly creative outfit.

Artist: Saxon

Title: ‘Dogs Of War’ – 12" Picture Disc

Cat No: DEMREC07

Quantity: Strictly limited to 750 copies

Info: Recorded on Boston England, the twelfth studio album "Dogs Of War", orginially released in 1995, was Saxon’s third for Virgin Germany and was the last album to feature guitarist Graham Oliver. The 10-track epic is a move in the heavier direction for Saxon and features rock powerhouses ‘Burning Wheels’ and ‘Demolition Alley’ with monstrous artwork and trademark pounding riffs.

Artist: Ian McCulloch (What Records Exclusive & Demon)

Album Title: ‘Holy Ghosts’ – Triple transparent yellow vinyl

Cat No: DEMREC15

Quantity: Strictly limited to 500 copies worldwide

Info: Celebrating the releases of McCulloch’s new double album package Holy Ghosts – Demon Records are releasing an exclusive triple pack of the album featuring 15 brand new orchestral reworkings of classic Echo & The Bunnymen produced and mixed by Youth along with the new studio album.

UK Live Dates 16 June – London – Scala (with Uhuhboo Project) 23 June – Camber Sands – All Tomorrow’s Parties 13 July – London – East End Live Festival – Performing live underscore to Carnival of Souls

Having spent the last year and a half playing truant – as the rhythm section in a French band – Bailey and drummer, Peter Wilkinson, dust off their halos and re-focus on The Saints.

‘King of the Sun’ was produced by Fortunato Luchresi and engineered by Sean Carey. The title track will be the first single taken from the album. Initially released in Australia November 2012 to coincide with the band’s Australian tour

Chris Bailey says of the album, “The Saints have always been my main passion, despite my promiscuity and desire for musical experiment I feel that The Saints are an unfinished musical journey. This album is one step closer on this road.”

The tracks are subtle metaphors, disguised in nostalgia or cherishment of a time gone by; they capture the difficulties and the despair of our times.

The Saints continue to entertain crowds far and wide, throughout the world. Details of UK/European live dates will be announced soon.

Over the years the band have released 15 studio albums, 17 singles, 6 EPs, 2 live albums and 10 compilation albums, not to mention Bailey’s solo output and collaborations with other artists.

And they have done a shitload more but this is just PR, listen to the music….